A Politicized Art – one day symposiumLoughborough University School of Art & Design
Wednesday 19 November 2008

Towards the formation of a critical counter public sphere: A one-day symposium to explore the relationship between art practice and the public sphere.

In the debased public sphere of the mass media, public opinion is administered, monitored, managed and manufactured by the private interests of big business, including the private interests of the owners of global media companies and the commercial interests of advertisers and sponsors.

Critical art is emancipatory, dialogical and dissenting. It is recalcitrant and unmanageable. A critical art is a politicized art and therefore concerned with the current condition of liberal democracy; this symposium asks how can critical art practices bring their autonomy to bear upon a debased public sphere and enable the formation of a critical counter public sphere?
Speakers: Malcolm Barnard, Freee Art Collective, Andrew Hunt, Marysia Lewandowska, Jim McGuigan, Malcolm Miles and Simon Sheikh.

Jim McGuigan – The Cultural Public Sphere: Critical Measure of Public Culture?

UTOPIA
Use of art in the public space/realm masks the other problems with regeneration, i.e., the depression of the minority through the controlling of them via the design of the public space/realm/sphere

Capitalism is nothing and unworkable without the very people it aims to exclude.
Art is nothing and unworkable without the very people it aims to exclude.

J Robertson, & F Jameson, ‘Post Modernism, Politics & Art’

Freee Art Collective ( Beech, Hewitt and Jordan) – A Politicized Art– Slogan and Reimbodiement
Take a position and divide opinion

Saw this website, by Miriam Kathrein, which is following on from a masters project. Found it an interesting way of tackling and debating the relationship and shifting roles of artists and curators in contemporary art…. but mostly enjoyed the tactics of using the Tote bag as a way of disseminating the ongoing struggle in a message or in a “visualised” debate!!!